Valve Blowing Off Some Steam at Casual Connect
Shots fired at the Casual Connect USA conference in Seattle this week! Valve casually dropped the statistic that Steam, its digital distribution platform for computer users, currently reaches 67 million monthly active players.
For comparison, Microsoft said last month that it had 53 million active Xbox Live users in the most recent quarter.
But big daddy Valve ain’t done: the company shared that it now has 33 million daily active players with a peak concurrent user count of 14 million (the peak in 2015 was just 8.4 million). Additionally, since January 2016, Steam has had 27 million new purchasers which works out to nearly 1.5 million transactions per month.
Valve owes much of its continued success to international growth and competitive tournament play.
According to GeekWire, Asia just a few years ago represented only a few percentage points as it relates to Steam’s worldwide sales. That figure has risen to 17 percent which, according to Valve’s Tom Giardino, is a direct result of efforts to localize stores and accept additional payment methods.
Steam’s library is another contributing factor. The total count is 781 million games that are playable on Steam right now. Forbes even reported back in 2014 that nearly 37% of Steam’s games have never been played. Something for everyone, as their library outpaces their users by almost twelve times.
Valve is set to host its annual Dota 2 tournament next week in Seattle with a record-setting prize pool of more than $23.5 million.
PC ain’t dead, you ain’t gonna kill that keyboard and mouse game with dem sticks, boy! PC here to stay! Woop Woop!